Sex, drugs, and vital news (in that order)

This month in the news
Here are some of the most active news subjects over the last month to break over the last month or so:
1. Anna Nicole Smith: died; trial ensues over where she will be buried
2. Astronaut drama: NASA love triangle leads to kidnapping plot
3. Iraq: more bombings; Iran possibly supplying weapons; British begin withdrawl
4. Global Warming: international panel says warming "unequivocably" caused by humans
5. Presidential race: McCain & Obama announce; sharp words exchanged between the Clinton and Obama camps.

To demonstate how popular these stories are, I did a google news search to see how many stories were published on each in the U.S. last week. Here are the results, in order from most to least:
1. Iraq: 157,323
2. Anna Nicole Smith: 20,178 articles (1,000 within the last 15 hours).
3. Global warming: 19,088
4. Presidential race: 17,567
5. Astronaut story: 4,671

Other factors
Some additional factors should be noted when considering these features:
-Global warming got a boost this week with Inconvenient Truth winning a few Oscars and the subsequent attack on Al Gore's power consumption; also from new UN Secretary General stressing the urgency of action
-The astronaut story is now more than a few weeks older than Anna Nicole's story.
-This was a medium-to-low intensity week in Iraq, with action in Afghanistan likely drawing some attention away.

Why I find this significant
The reason why I find this significant is the potential consequences that each of these events have for the reader and world in the future. Here is that analysis:
Possible Consequences
1. Iraq: war has killed hundreds of thousands. More will likely die in the future, country flirts with civil war, hundreds of thousands of US troops possibly to be withdrawn.
2. Anna Nicole Smith: no discernable impact on anyone besides few friends and family members (excludes emotional impact)
3. Global warming: Sea levels possibly rise to displace hundreds of millions of people, drinking water and food supply problems cause famine among billions, temperature and disease changes affect millions, weather events continue to wreak havoc, trillions of dollars lost, Earth becomes unsustainable to humans.
4. Presidential Race: Next presidential electee makes executive decisions that have some economic and social effects on Americans
5. Astronaut scandal: no discernable impact on anyone except the few involved.

My point
You probably understand my point by now, but here it is directly: why is it that we, as news readers, are more interested by the death of an infamous celebrity than the possibility of global catastrophe and a threat to human existence?

This is more or less a rhetorical question. I'm pretty sure that the answer is that we're drawn to things that are dramatic and immediate, and bored by things that are large, slow moving, and subtle. Global warming isn't nearly as imminently threatening as a terrorist attack, and it is not a human entity that we can demonize and worry about. It is big and ubiquitous instead of localized; it is not as easy to understand and fear. Simply: it isn't sexy, so we don't pay it attention.

In the grand scheme of things, global warming is huge and Anna Nicole is invisible. If you were to draw a timeline of the human race on a paper, the period during which we've been able to live in comfort and travel quickly through harnessing chemical energy would be represented by a microscopic tic smaller than the breadth of a hair. We've been in control of the world for a fraction of a fraction of our existence, and we've already brought it perilously close to the edge. It's the equivalent of a 16-year-old being handed the keys for the first time, and totaling the car on a tree in the driveway. Or crashing through the closed garage door. Stepping back and looking at the human race as a whole, I believe that global warming will be the most important event in history, and the fastest. It will have taken far less time than it took us to master fire, the wheel, agriculture. No other major event in human history will have happened so quickly, or have had as big of an effect.

Now that I have expatiated a while, lets return to the media.
Here is my question:
Does the media have any obligation to hold us in perspective on these issues, or can they only be expected to be concerned with making a profit, as every other business is?

I seriously cannot answer that question, but perhaps it would be instructive to observe how the media has covered these two events to get a sense of whether they believe that they have such an obligation:

How the different major outlets compare
Here's a comparion of some major online news outlets. I'm ranking them based on Global Warming articles per Anna Nicole Smith article:
_________________ANS ____ GW ______ GW/ANS
CNN_______________51 ____ 34 ________ .67
Fox News_________154_____ 126 _______ .83
Washington Post____134 ____ 230 _______ 1.72
BBC________________7 ____ 136 _______ 19.4
New York Times______2 ____ 169 _______ 84.5

My analysis
CNN and Fox are in a ratings war, and hoping to eat eachother's lunch, so their ratio is pretty close to one another. They're both shooting for the lowest-common-denominator news watcher, someone who is not neccesarily reading the news for any specific reason, just scanning it to catch up. These are the people who are the most likely to have their eye caught by an Anna Nicole Smith article and click on it.
BBC and NY Times are catered towards a more educated audience, who are apparantly more sensitive to global warming issues and less inclined to be interested in Anna Nicole Smith. I'm impressed that the NYT ran even less articles on Anna Nicole than the BBC, whose readers would theoretically care even less as they live an ocean away.
The Washington Post is a little anomalous. It ran the most total articles on the subjects combined. It would seem that the Post is interested in picking up online gossip readship. Why the Post and not the Times is angling for that audience is beyond me.